WE KNOW we live in complicated times when our sense of civility and civilisation becomes defined by a foamy white blob, the size of a 10p piece.

That is where we found ourselves last week, with the news that a junior council official at the London Borough of Enfield had threatened members of a local football team with prosecution for spitting on the pitch.

Those who prefer to win their trophies in the pub quiz arena may know that Enfield has several claims to fame. Its factories once boasted the world’s first non-valve colour television and the first dishwasher, and it played host to the world’s first ATM cash dispenser. It is no surprise, then, that the borough led the way once more last month by introducing the nation’s first bylaw criminalising spitting in public spaces.

Wisely, its burghers did not drape their decision with a public health risk banner as the theory that spitting spreads disease is pretty much discredited. Nor did they ban it because it is disgusting.

Instead they responded to complaints by residents, fed up with being intimidated by youths practising one of the most passively aggressive acts imaginable.

It doesn’t take aiming at the face, already classed as Common Assault, to be aggressive. Spitting on the ground while someone passes can be intimidating.

Before we drift away in some nostalgic reverie to a time when this land was populated by Trevor Howards and Celia Johnsons and self- restraint was the season’s only colour, it is worth noting that spitting in public is not new and nor is it a foreign import. As Plymouth University sociologist Dr Ross Coomber will tell you: “We’ve always been a nation of spitters.”

Truman’s Brewery was still building pubs with spitting troughs that ran the length of the bar in the Thirties, just before that Brief Encounter took place. Partly, it is a legacy of the coal and heavy industry that once prevailed but also there was rebellion.

Mods and Rockers of the Fifties would have had their share of “phlegmthrowers”.

That said, it was also common in Elizabethan times to evacuate ones bowels on the pavement. Things have moved on.

Those councillors in Enfield, and all who followed them, should be applauded for taking a stand.

Yet what a hollow victory it is that obliges civility, decency and consideration for others under threat of a criminal prosecution. Can there be a louder admission of failure?

Whatever happened to those halcyon days when society knew the rules, when we all played the same game? Somehow the apple of wisdom that taught Adam and Eve about shame was replaced by the kebab of couldn’t-care-less.

“We” turned into “me” and it became OK not to care what others thought. How many would tell a teen off for spitting? How many teens would even listen?

It was also common in Elizabethan times to evacuate ones bowels on the pavement

We now live under one of the most criminalised regimes in the Western world, using laws like industrial staple-guns to crudely stitch our gaping wounds.

Just last week Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumpton lamented that the 3,000 (yes, 3,000) new criminal offences added to the statute book during Tony Blair’s time in office were necessary because we no longer had the religious or moral codes which once guided our behaviour. “The problem is that the technical and intellectual capacities of mankind have grown faster than its moral sensibilities or its co-operative instincts,” he said. How right he is.

Etiquette guru William Hanson claims: “We now have a generation of parents who were not taught manners themselves.”

He should know, for the author of the Bluffer’s Guide To Etiquette spends his days filling that gap, from teaching four-year-olds how to say please and thank you, to table-manners for graduate bankers.

“I teach things people used to take for granted,” he says.

Enfield Council’s warning to Winchmore Hill FC was met with derision, with players arguing that it was unenforceable. Council chiefs retracted, saying they never intended to apply the law to sports grounds.

Both sides miss the point.

There is no real excuse for spitting on a pitch. For the most part the act is psychological; a tick, a momentary act of aggression.

Just imagine if the likes of Suarez or Rooney proclaimed spitting was for losers. As Enfield’s cabinet member for environment Chris Bond pointed out: “You never saw Bobby Moore spit.”